Honda CRF300L review Is it the best Dual sport ever?

honda crf 300l the bike of your dual sport dreams [Music] maybe [Music] what's up guys my name is andrew and this is my honda 300l full review i've been making a ton of videos on the honda 300l and i've put about 500 miles on this bike oddly enough most of those miles have been off-road but i have taken this bike on road on trails in sand and in some really deep mud i feel i have a good understanding of the bike at this point and i'm here to help you guys out make a more informed decision whether or not you should buy this bike or consider this bike for your own personal use first i just want to take a second and talk about bike reviews out there when you're looking for a review usually you find one of two less than ideal situations in one scenario you'll find a big bike reviewer who is far removed from the common rider and their needs are sometimes biased when they come to a bike review and fear that if they do do a negative review they may never get a chance to ride a sample bike again this happens in many different industries and when it comes to dual sports and motorcycles i believe it's not much different now i'm not saying these bikers have bad credibility or anything like that but in some scenarios they are leaned to give maybe a more positive review than they would like on the other side of the spectrum you find new riders maybe someone who this could be their first or maybe third bike and sure they love their bike but they don't have many experiences to compare it to so their bias will bleed out into the joy of having the bike and they'll express the interest of justifying their purchase today i'm coming to you as a dual sport rider i've had experience with many bikes over the years no i've never raced motocross and i've never done a hair scramble but i enjoy putting miles on my dual sports on and off road by no means is this all of them but as i'm talking i'll take the time to mention the bikes that i've had and had the luxury of putting hours on and i'll throw some pictures up here and these were the ones that i happen to have on this very hard drive on the computer that i'm making this video the point i'm trying to make is i'm someone in the middle of both scenarios mentioned before where i feel i can offer good advice to the average person looking to buy this particular dual sport so let's break this review down and firstly i'm going to say this is probably going to take a while because something like the 300l is really worth explaining in detail so hopefully you're comfortable and let's get ready to go the road use of this bike is very important i mean after all we are dual sport riders if we never went on the road we might as well just get a dirt bike and call it a day so just like any dual sport this bike has to be capable on the road which is a point that some people may argue is a problem for a small displacement bike like this you've seen a time and time again when a lot of the 250s out there that they are just not capable enough for the road i for one was super excited when i heard the news that honda was going to offer a fuel-injected 286 cc dual sport the best dual sport and experiences i have ever had have been on my dr350s which also has a six-speed transmission and has enough power on the road along with enough low-end off-road but the 300l turned in to be much much more than this this bike is smooth i can quote my ride in buddy jacob by saying it didn't really even feel like a dual sport it felt smooth like a road bike this bike is smooth to the point that if you wanted to you could strictly use it as a commuter bike for sure the 300l rally may do that a bit better and has a bigger fuel tank and a slightly longer wheelbase but the honda 300l is no slouch on the road with a top speed of 85 miles per hour you can achieve highway speeds without an issue if you had to the stock irc tires and the soft suspension feel amazing on the road if you take anything from this review just remember this for someone who just wants to ride back and forth to work and hit some fire cuts or light trails on the weekends this bike is for you stock this bike will meet all your needs and it will feel great doing it hands down the road experience on this bike is probably one of the best a dual sport can offer at least until you get to the more advanced touring adventure type bikes which are much bigger have more displacement and cost much more money as comfort goes this bike's not that bad i was actually surprised most dual sports feel like you're sitting on a 2x6 piece of wood this bike's not that bad but just like all dual sports you will know that you are riding one after an extended ride and you may want to get a more comfortable seat if you are doing extended rides on this bike but i can say personally that i would have to say this bike stock is more comfortable than my sv 650 was after a long extended ride on an sv 650 i was so numb that i would just want to get off the bike and walk around and honestly the seat doesn't matter quite as much on a dual sport because the pegs are orientated in such a way that if you wanted to you could do a bit of your riding standing up and give your butt a break the sea height of this bike is 34.7 inches and a rally is 35.2 both reasonably good not too tall where you feel top heavy but tall enough allowing for good ground clearance and suspension travel as well as allowing a 21 inch front tire and 18-inch rear which when we start to talk about the off-road stuff that really comes into play so in my opinion i would have to say ford's class the honda 300l gets a 10 out of 10 on the road by far one of the best dual sport on-road experiences that i have personally rode so [Music] okay so since we took time to talk about on-road conditions let's take some time to talk about a little more technical off-road type stuff like light trails fire cuts and loose dirt i would have to say most of all this is where this bike shines it's so much fun once you take this bike through some light trails you'll really appreciate the dual sport nature of this type of riding see the 300l feels almost like a dirt bike sure we all know it's not and in fact it knows it's not and will remind you of that anytime you try to go crazy but the beauty of a bike like this is being able to just ride around and think to yourself hmm i wonder where that trail goes well i don't see any signs saying i can't go there i could always play dumb and say i took a wrong turn yeah let's do it that inner feeling is so freeing this is why we love dual sports so much and once you get off-road the honda 300l kind of feels like a dirt bike because the gears complement that feeling the gears are spaced very close together at low speeds and the tires are the right size to complement that feeling once again the tires are pretty good at this but once you find yourself doing a little more off-road and doing this more often than not it comes time that you're going to need more aggressive tires me personally i ran the stock tires for all of one night by day two i put my pirelli on the front and my michelin ac-10 on the rear of the bike but for me this was an extreme situation for i was going to be taking it on saying in single track the next day there was another camping trip where i was going to spend the whole weekend dual sport riding so by no means did i need to do that if i was consistently staying on light trails which most people do and once again the soft suspension kind of complements this type of riding if you're not going over anything too crazy and you're not getting any air the soft suspension is actually relieving it feels good only when you get caught off guard by a big rut do you actually notice how soft it really is so once again if you are taking this bike just for rides down soft trails dirt roads fire cuts this bike feels great and it excels [Music] all right now let's move on to off-road for me i would have to say you have to take it with a grain of salt if you're talking about the bike completely stock it can be relatively bad off-road i mean on the thick stuff you absolutely need new tires a set of kendra trackmasters would do great on this bike they're pretty cheap and pretty easy to swap out though just like anything if you move towards one direction you lose usefulness in the other if you still want to do a ton of road i would suggest going with maybe a dumlap d606 you could probably get 1500 to 2000 miles depending on how much on off road you do but that type of tire me personally i wanted to try out the michelin ac 10 and it looks like i'm to get about a thousand miles before i personally want to swap them out they'll still have life in them but just not enough where i would feel that it's a competent offer attire but as i mentioned before the tire size is ideal and the gearing is great so as far as for off-road the power is great for people who have rode the 250l this is nothing like it so the bike is still using something like the cbr engine but they extended the stroke giving the bike acclaimed 18 to 20 percent more low end power that coupled with a new transmission and more aggressive stock sprockets makes the bike very formidable off-road stock given that you get it some good tires honestly the bike feels really well and it's very maneuverable have no problems switching in and out between tree to tree on single track some people may be complaining about the weight 308 pounds but honestly it's a pretty easy fix if you swap out the exhaust change the battery to lithium swap out the bars aluminum sprocket take off your foot pegs you'll probably get under 280 pounds i've done everything above except for the exhaust and i've also done a tail tidy kit that's a pound or so i didn't weigh that one yet but i can tell you that my bike should be about under 300 pounds but at the same time i added on a skin plate and hand guards but you will get criticism from the ktm and husqvarna guys that claim that their bike is only 238 pounds dry weight and so actuality this bike is really not that much heavier 238 pounds can easily be 260 278 pounds depending on cooling fluids fuel brake fluid etc a lot of stuff has weight guys and roughly about eight pounds a gallon but regardless the bike doesn't feel heavy i would have to say personally the only limitation of this bike is me if you were an amazing rider and just rode off-road all the time you could really do some amazing things with this bike it seems like any time i pointed out a hill it climbs right up it with no problem at all and that was even before every did the gearing the one thing to note though is this is where your suspension's gonna start to be a problem i do a lot of stand-up ridings for for me it's not too big of a deal i just bounce through it it's not as squishy as something like the 250l but i would say for a heavier rider you should get stiffer springs it's not an unreasonable request being this bike is only fifty three hundred dollars msrp and if you end up spending a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars in suspension it puts you at the price range of a wr250 which seems pretty reasonable for this bike so all in all offer this is a pretty comparable bike and it seems to do everything i wanted to do now let's real quickly talk about looks and aesthetics if you guys have been following the channel i'm sure you've seen tons of b-roll with me putting pictures about this bike and even in my video of my top favorite things the top things i love about this bike the looks and aesthetics were number one this bike looks clean and it looks aggressive almost everywhere you go you will get a compliment or you will get stairs and people just admiring the beauty of this bike has sharp lines high fenders beautiful color it's put together really nice something you will always get compliments on and you can go a little step further like i did i did the tail tidy kit put some rim decals on and it really makes it pop but that's enough about that i just wanted to briefly talk about aesthetics because you guys can find pictures of this bike anywhere but since this is my review of course i wanted to put in my own personal opinion service intervals and reliability so i was watching a video the other night and these guys were in the u.s and they were taking a travel from the east coast to the west coast it's a common trail and tons of people attempted on motorcycles the thing about this video though is every other day they seem to be changing their oil because our bike only had a 600 to 800 mile oil interval the honda 300l suggests that you change your oil every 8 000 miles and then every other oil change you change the filter and your oil that is insane first off i don't think anyone would do this and also it's worth noting that every year you should change your oil anyway instead of waiting for 8 000 miles but just the fact this is the ideal service intervals that honda recommends just shows you that this bike is built to last now me personally i'll be changing my oil every 1000 miles at the longest maybe 1 500 if i was on a long road trip and most of my miles were highway but there's something to be said about a bike that you really don't have to maintain every single weekend i mean imagine going on an eight-hour ride through your favorite off-roading spot and then you gotta change your well for next week it would get quite tedious especially if you have to move stuff like a skid plate when it comes to reliability this bike makes me think of the 250l the 250l was bulletproof in fact in probably like 10 years you're probably gonna still see 250ls around with 30 000 or plus miles that bike's probably gonna last forever and since this is a modified version of that engine one would assume that this bike would last forever as well i know it's crazy to a lot of people out there but i find myself pulling to the interest of bikes that have very good reliability sometimes more importantly and almost probably most of the times more importantly than performance as you see from the three bikes that i have reliability is key for me and man a great service interval is a huge plus so when you purchase a honda 300l i would say you have the peace of mind that this bike is gonna last honda reliability is some of the best what was the old saying honda never gets there first but it always makes it so this is the part where we talk about negatives drawbacks of this bike i made a video of the top things i hate about this bike and honestly that was just me expressing the things that weren't perfect there's not really much wrong with this bike especially for the price range if this bike was ten thousand dollars then i would sit here and pick apart every piece of it that is not perfect i mean yes some of it's cheap but the bike is so affordable that it's almost hard to argue when you offer a product to such a fair price compared to what everything else is on the market then people are willing to overlook small details and little things they can just change themselves with this bike being so inexpensive you could put a couple thousand dollars of your own money into it and make it exactly what you want so there's not too much to complain about it although there is one thing okay i'm gonna go off script and i'm just gonna talk freely about this and i hope you guys don't think i'm crazy but here it goes there's one thing that really bothers me about this bike and right now that's the availability you know it's crazy i have this motorcycle and i'm constantly telling people how how much i like it and you should test drive it my friends take it for a ride see if you like it but the problem is to one end i'm making this video for you guys that hopefully in the future there's more availability but if i try to talk you into this bike so we can be some sort of like connection of us having the same experiences it's not like you can feel that right now because this bike isn't available it's like you have to reserve it and then you have to wait be a lucky one that gets it first i reserved mine early this year and it got delayed so many times i almost got frustrated enough to the rage quit to give up i'm glad i didn't so my biggest complaint is that this bike there's just not enough of them in fact i wish i wish i had a bunch of them to be honest you know i should do that i should start a uh a petition online right to honda saying honda you need to make more honda 300ls and you need to give me a bunch of them right because i would have a video up and it would just be like me standing in my pole board and i would open the doors you would see me and you would see a ton of honda 300 l's and i wouldn't keep any of them i would just give them to you guys like hey all the guys have been subscribed you guys been commenting saying man i'm waiting for a bike i can't wait to get one it's so hard for me to get one or i can't afford it i'll be like they're right here come get them all you have to do is get it home you can have them the video would be like i hit the lottery honda 300ls and i'd just be giving them and i'd just be giving them out to everybody but i'll have to do like one video riding trip of the honda 300ls all together it'd be amazing so yeah so that's what's gonna happen guys if i get a bunch of 300 l's from honda or even one more if somebody just gives me a honda 300l i'm giving it to you guys you guys will be like going back to your friends with this beautiful bike and your buddy would be like dude where the heck did you get that bike i don't know just some dude online his name is andrew he has this like honda 300l channel he does motorcycles off-road and he just gave me the bike he said come get it so i came there and i got it anyway i got off on a tangent awesome scenario but that's my biggest complaint my biggest complaint is that i can't talk anybody into getting this bike it's not a matter of can they just go get it it's a matter of all the hoops they gotta jump through then they gotta wait if they already spend their money on some other bike like i have a loyal subscriber and he said hey i have to wait to this long to get the honda 300l it's lukefish i believe in the comments and then he's like but i could get a drz right now what should i do and a lot of these people their scenario is you know they're not gonna buy two bikes they're gonna have to buy a bike and deal with it and honestly if i had a drz 400 i wouldn't even be interested in a honda 300l because i already have a bike that fits that needs yet are two completely different bikes and i if i had to choose both of them side by side i would take the 300l but if i already had a drz what would be the point so it's kind of a hard sell and it's kind of weird having a channel for a bike that no one has or no one can relate to and the people that are watching it a lot of times some of them have them but some of them are just you know looking for information about a bike it kind of hinders your popularity as well because motorcycling in general or dual sporting even is a small niche of a niche and now i'm mostly talking about a bike that people don't have or can't get so it's weird so that's my biggest complaint conclusions and final thoughts who is this bike for so thinking about the honda 300l and everything that we've mentioned previously in this video that the honda 300l is a great bike it really is and i feel like in time this is going to be one of those bikes that's never going to be perfect it might not even be some people's first choice but i think this bike's gonna have a cult following for years to come when you tackle on reliability this level of performance ease of use for beginners and how fun this bike can be for advanced riders you really have something here honda really has fire here and this bike has so many applications and so many uses whether it be turning it into a supermoto adventuring whatever we mentioned i'm sure there's going to be a place for it being an owner and taking it on every type of train imaginable i would have to say it excels at nothing but is pretty damn good at almost everything and honestly as a dual sport rider that's what most of us are looking for sure 27 horsepower is never going to give you an adrenaline rush when you rip the throttle and the shocks are a little soft and the seat might be a little hard but when it comes to affordability reliability fuel injection 6-speed transmission reasonably decent seat height years of interchangeable parts this bike's probably going to be around for a long time and honestly i feel like it's so much better than the 250l and you see tons of people who had 250ls and they love those bikes if you loved your 250l you'll really love this bike it's only better in almost every way than the 250l in fact if you have both you'll probably see yourself not riding in 250l too often even though you have nostalgia and tons of love and tons of time with that bike see for me i was never a fan of a 250l i was the fan of the dr350s and this bike is basically that bike more refined fuel injection but it's very similar to that bike so honestly i fit right at home with this bike and now this video is coming to a close and you have my review and you have my opinions if you stayed for this long you guys are awesome i mean that basically means you sat here and listened to me talk about my experiences with this bike for like 20 minutes but i hope at the end of the day at least you got more information about this bike maybe saw some cool visuals you like about this bike and it could help you make a more informed decision whether or not if you get the opportunity to buy this bike overall as dual sport writers we're a small group of people and we're all kind of in this together in my time with this youtube community because i've done youtube in the past this community is amazing you barely find anybody who has anything negative to say whereas my other channel it was just like you know people are crazy so it's awesome to see something like this that brings everyone together if you found any value in this video or if you've watched more than one of my videos do me a huge favor and subscribe hit the like button below and leave a comment comments helps so much and if you don't know what to comment comment what number like you are that would be great this is a relatively new channel for me and youtube doesn't like to really feature new channels you're seen as a risk because you're not really making that monetization money so i'm the underdog here just trying to make some waves so thanks again guys i appreciate all of you my name is andrew and this is my honda 300l review thanks guys foreign

Channel: MotorcyclesOffroad

Views: 86,044

Rating: 4.914259 out of 5

Keywords: Motorcycle, Honda300L, Honda 300L, CRF 300L, Honda CRF 300L, honda crf300l, dual sport, off road, crf300l review, crf300l rally, crf 300 l, crf300l vs 250l, crf300 rally, adventure motorcycle, dirt bike, street legal, first ride, Honda CRF300L review, Honda 300L review, 300L review

Id: 21MM-_iJhbA

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021